Lexiphanes (11-15)

“I,” quoth Eudemus, “was summoned as it grew crepuscular by Damasias the quondam athlete and champion, now out of the lists for eld—the brazen image, you know, in the square.[*] He was hard at it a-plucking and a-singeing, for he intended to marry off his daughter to-day and was busking her. Then a Termerian[*] misadventure befell that cut short the gala day. Distraught over I know not what, or more likely overtaken by divine detestation, his son Dion hung himself, and, depend upon it, he would have been undone if I had not been there to slip the noose and relieve him of his coil. Squatting on my

“Prithee,” quoth I, “dost mean that notable Dion, the slack-pursed libertine, the toothpickchewing aesthete, who strouts and gropes if ever he sees anyone that is well hung? He is a scapegrace and arutter.” “Well,” said Eudemus, “Damasias in amaze invoked the goddess—they have an Artemis in the middle of the hall, a Scopadean masterpiece —and he and his wife, who is now elderly and quite lyart-polled,[*] flung themselves upon her and besought her to pity them. She at once inclined her head, and he was well; so that now they have a Theodore[*] or rather, manifestly an Artemidore[*] in the young man. So they have made offerings of all sorts to her, including bows and arrows, since she takes pleasure in these; for Artemis is a good bowyer, she is a Far-darter, a very Telemachus.”[*]

“Let us be drinking, then,” quoth Megalonymus, “for I am come bringing you this senile flagon, green cheese, windfallen olives—I keep them under wormscriven seals[*]—and other olives, soused, and

And now that we have drunk, we shall gossip according to our wont, for in good sooth it is not inopportune to prate when we are in our cups.” “T approve this,” said I, “and why not, for we are the sheer quintessence of Atticism.” ‘ Very true,” quoth Callicles, “for quizzing each other incessantly is a whet to loquacity.” “As to me,” said Eudemus, “since it is brumal I had liefer fence myself with stiffer drink. I am starved with cold, and when I am warmed I would fain hear these handiwise[*] folk, the flute-player and the harper.”

“What was that you said, Eudemus?” said I. “Do you enjoin alogy upon us as if we were inarticulate and elinguid? My tongue is already pregnant with utterance, and in sooth I set sail in the intent to archaise with you and wash you up with my tongue, one and all. But you have treated me as if a three-masted vessel were sailing before the wind with full kites, running easy and spooming over the billows, and then someone, letting go double-tongued refrainers,[*] pigs of iron,[*] and bowers, were to curb the impetuosity of her course, begrudging her the fair wind.”

“Well, then,” quoth he, “you, if you like, may sail and swim and course over the main, but I from off the land, with a drink at my elbow, like Homer’s Zeus, shall look upon you either from a bald cop or the pitch of heaven as you drive and the wind gives your vessel a saucy fairing from astern.”